Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [98]
“Threepio.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. Essentially, something was speaking on the comm wave. Or rather, the comm signal was picking up something’s speech.”
“Another comm signal?”
“Oh, no no no, nothing so sophisticated. It’s simply a language—electrospeech is a type of direct energy modulation used by a variety of life-forms; to date, I believe the total known to science numbers over—”
“Forget that. This electrospeech—you understand it?”
The droid drew himself up proudly. “I am fluent in over six million forms of—”
“I don’t need a list. What’d it say?”
“Well—translated as best I can, you understand, their accent is perfectly barbarous—they were about to take a pair of humans captive, and will deliver them to the crypt chamber.”
Lando shook his head. “What crypt chamber? And who’s taking who captive?”
“I’m sure I cannot say who the captors might be; the language would be appropriate for any number of energy-based life-forms.”
“Then why are you wasting my time with this?”
“Oh, well, it’s because these two captives were apparently accompanied by a Wookiee.”
“A Wookiee?”
“It does seem an unlikely coincidence. And they also mention a droid—hmm, parsing … half human size, round as a pillar spine, rotating dome—Artoo! Oh, General Calrissian, we must do something! They have Artoo!”
“All right, all right, slow down.” If whoever this was had R2-D2, they might even have Luke—or at least know what happened to him. That’s what Lando told himself, anyway; somehow it made him feel better to have at least a theoretically valid argument of military necessity for the rescue mission he was already pretty sure he was going to order anyway. “How did that signal punch through in the first place?”
“That’s exactly the point, General. I suspect that the natural frequency of this particular energy-based life-form confines it to a certain variety of electromagnetically active rock—this would be this life-form’s natural environment, as it were—and while this rock may very well interfere with an ordinary comm signal, its conductive properties should actually enable it to resonate with and reinforce a properly modulated—”
“I get it. Can you reproduce this modulation? Can you run it through the ship’s comm?”
“Well—in all modesty, perhaps Artoo would be more—”
Lando gritted his teeth against an almost overpowering urge to twist C-3PO’s head off. “Can you do it?”
“I am fluent in over—”
“Don’t tell me.” Lando pointed at the comm board. “Tell the ship.”
LUKE SCRAMBLED THROUGH THE DEEP CINDERS WITH Nick close behind. Taspan had sunk below the horizon; the only light came from the burning wreckage scattered across the floor of the crater, and from the occasional flashes and flares of the battle that raged above.
The cinder crunched and gave way almost like fine sand beneath every step, making the going slow and hard. The crater was also littered with bigger chunks—masses of hardened lava and rocky ejecta, most of which were a featureless, nonreflective black, which made them very hard to see; even Luke only discovered the medium-sized ones by painfully whacking one with his shins. He would have gone more cautiously, but the first time an ion panel blown off a TIE came whistling down and shattered into shrapnel a couple of dozen meters away, he gave up the idea of slow and careful.
They ran hard. At least when Luke caught his foot on a chunk and fell, he could use the Force to flip himself in the air and hit the ground running. Nick didn’t have that option, but somehow he managed to reach the relative shelter beneath the slant of the Falcon’s hull only a few steps behind Luke, even though he was limping, both hands were bleeding, and he had a nasty-looking scrape on his forehead.
The Falcon loomed over them, blacking out the stars. Its attitude thrusters flared and sprayed jets of gas in a seemingly random sequence—trying to rock itself free—and the whine of its